One summer when I was around eight or so, my friend Rose and I spent a week at my grandparents’ cabin on Camano Island in Puget Sound. We played at many things, but one I remember well was when we made “Indian crackers.” My father, who was part Native American and proud of his heritage, had told us stories of how the Indians fed themselves on crackers made from seaweed when there was nothing else to eat. For some reason this sounded romantic to us, so one hot sunny day we decided to make these Indian crackers for ourselves.

Washington beaches are notoriously rocky, and clinging to these rocks is an abundance of green leafy-looking seaweed. We pried an armful of seaweed off the rocks and found a big flat rock where we carefully smoothed the slick seaweed out flat, pressing our pudgy hands down on its surface until we had a large sheet of seaweed. Then we ran to Grandma and borrowed a box of salt, and sprinkled the salt lavishly over the seaweed and left it to dry in the sun.

Later that afternoon, the salt-seaweed cracker had dried completely, and we eagerly broke it in pieces and sampled it. Naturally enough, our crackers were foul, brackish, absolutely dreadful. We had to drink at least four glasses of Kool Aid to get rid of the taste, and even then it wasn’t completely gone – the next morning we both woke up with our mouths in the same state we’d later know as “hang-over” mouth.

 Our opinion of Native Americans took a nose dive. They weren’t romantic, they were crazy. No matter what my Dad said.

When I was ten my father began a tradition of taking me out on a "date" each year on my birthday. First he'd take me to buy a new dress, something you would wear to a nice restaurant. Then we'd go out to eat, and he'd arrange it beforehand that the restaurant he chose would treat me royally, like someone special. Then we would wrap up the evening by going to a movie.

There are not words enough to describe how much I liked this tradition. I did feel special; someone who deserved the best — and incidentally, as no doubt my father intended, I learned how to behave like a "lady" in public.

I remember that first date, in 1960. It was an evening of bliss.

First of all, I was allowed to take the bus from our suburban home to meet my father at the bus station in downtown Seattle — all by myself. My mother had opposed this plan, but my father told her that I was responsible enough to be trusted now — after all, I was ten!

He bought me a pale lemon-colored dress and matching shoes at Frederick and Nelsons. I remember the saleslady fawning over me and flirting with him. I was so pleased when he agreed that I didn't have to wear white anklets, but could wear my new flats without socks, like grown ladies did.

We went to Canlis for dinner, and I remember the candlelight twinkling on silver and the food arranged in an artistic pattern on the plate, not lumped together any old how. It was the first time it occurred to me that there was more to food than eating it, that food could be an art.

Finally, we went to see Ben-Hur even though I was so tired by then I could hardly keep my eyes open. I don't remember much about the movie itself, but I do remember thinking that however heroic Charlton Heston was, he was nothing compared to my dad.

I was 14, sheltered in middle-class suburbia, and innocent of what was really going on in the world. But I had a friend with an older brother who was into Bob Dylan, and when I was over at her house, he'd play his records for us and talk about war and racism and how god-awful the world really was. I loved to listen to him talk, and after a while I loved to listen to Bob Dylan too. When I first heard Dylan sing, I thought there must be something wrong with the record player. But then his voice, bad as it was, started to get to me. It was such a contrast to those mellow, smooth ballad singers my mother liked. Dylan's voice was raw and scratchy and just the right voice to sing about the truth — the real truth, not the prettified version served to children. And his scraggly, almost sleazy looks fit his voice perfectly. He looked like he slept in a bar after arguing politics all night and didn't bother to comb his hair because clean neat hair wasn't important. I knew instinctively my mother would not invite him to dinner. So obviously he must be a prophet.

I remember fishing with my grandfather when I was four and he was sixty-two. Or thereabouts. It wasn’t his choice to take me fishing, and he was grumpy because he liked to fish alone and besides he thought a little girl’s place was in the kitchen with grandma. But he began to thaw when I took the worm off the hook and ate it. He gleefully told my mother what I had done when we got home, laughing his high-pitched laugh that whistled through his nose, something like a tea kettle.  

I wasn’t scared of him even when he was grumpy. He smelled of wood smoke and some kind of astringent soap. His eyes were brown with thick black lashes, like a doe’s eyes. When he took a nap after we got back from fishing, sitting in his ratty armchair with his slippers half-falling off his feet, his lashes fluttered against his cheeks, beating time in harmony with his snoring. 

When I was about 4 years old, I wrote a poem about a bumblebee that my mother thought was the best poem any child had ever written. She copied it out in her prettiest handwriting, using a pen with thick black ink, and adding many flourishes and curliques. She used her best white stationary, not my newsprint drawing paper I originally wrote it on. And then she illustrated it with her own fabulous drawings (I thought they were fabulous because her bumblebees really looked like bees, not dots, and her flower like flowers, not smudges.) She hung this creation inside a real frame, on the living room wall, not on the refrigerator. Everyone who came into our house was taken to see the poem and it was read aloud to them. Mom always followed the reading with, "And she's only four!" Many nights that year, when the house was dark and silent, I would get out of bed and tiptoe into the living room so I could gaze at my framed poem hanging in that place of honor. I have won other honors since then, for which I am grateful, but none of them have given me as much satisfaction as my bumblebee poem in my mother's handwriting.

In 1942, “war work” was popular with all young women, and my mother, at age 21, was no exception. Three evenings a week, she volunteered at the Civil Air Patrol, where she was a “runner.” This meant she moved tiles around on a huge map of Seattle that covered the entire wall of the basement in a run-down office building, as directed by men who were charged with protecting the city in case of attack. Mom’s other war work was going to USO dances at Fort Lewis, where she danced and practiced her flirtation skills with young servicemen. The boys were far away from home and lonely, and soon to be even further away and scared. She felt it was her patriotic duty to let them fall in love with her.  

But then one night she went to the movies and saw a newsreel clip of Eleanor Roosevelt proudly commending the women who joined the women’s services. Mom was so lit up by patriotic fervor that she decided to join the WACs. However, she made the mistake of telling her current boyfriend about her plans. He was horrified and forbade it, saying that the service was no place for a woman. She wanted to marry him eventually, so she didn’t join the WACs.  

Later they broke up, so Mom decided to join the WAVEs. But her new boyfriend also had opinions on woman’s proper place, and she was forbidden again. So she didn’t join the WAVEs.  

The next time patriotism hit she was on boyfriend #3, but this time she went down and joined the Womens Marine Corps and told him nothing until the deed was done and she proudly showed up for their next date in uniform. This strategy worked, because not only did she get to serve her country, this was the man she married.

When I was seven I was taken to see “Pippi Longstocking” at the local children’s theatre. It was my first experience with live theatre and I was immediately hooked. The color, the music, the immediacy of a story brought to life right before your eyes! I was fascinated by the mixing of fantasy and reality, and how the phony could look utterly real. I knew Pippi’s bright red braids was a wig, yet when she danced and skipped across the stage and pulled one, I winced with everybody else at the imagined hurt.

But unlike many other children, I didn’t want to be on the stage myself. I didn’t want to play Pippi and be the star. I wanted to write the stories and then bring them to life – my own stories, people saying my words – creation at its fullest.

I began to write plays for myself. My actors were my friends, cousins, and especially my little brother. He was my favorite actor because he usually would do whatever I told him to do. But then he got a little older, and a lot bolder. By the time I was 10 and he was 6, he had become a writer/director’s nightmare.

I remember one play I wrote for some family occasion, the audience made up of aunts, uncles, grandparents and teenage cousins. I wrote and directed four younger cousins and my brother in a murder mystery that I was quite proud of for its plethora of red herrings, plot twists, and multiple suspects. My brother played the detective. Since he couldn’t read his lines, his part was small — all he had to do was come in at the end, wearing my father’s suit coat and hat, and carrying a toy gun. He was supposed to walk up to the murderer and arrest him. But as soon as he got on “stage” (the living room) ham entered his soul. He stalked up to each aunt and uncle in turn (they weren’t even part of the play!) and grilled them like suspects, making up accusations and threatening to give them the third degree. His impromptu antics heightened both the suspense and the hilarity, and even I admitted he was brilliantly funny. But my laughter was sort of sour. He literally stole my show by totally ignoring my beautifully crafted words.

After that, I much preferred writing books, where your characters don’t think for themselves.

In 1970 or thereabouts, the musical Hair came to Seattle. My boyfriend and I got tickets. My boyfriend was an amateur musician, and had done his own guitar arrangements for Let the Sunshine In, which he thought was pretty good – he often played it at parties. I loved to sing I Met a Boy Called Frank Mills, and although I had been told I had a good voice, I wasn’t as confident as my boyfriend, so I only sang at home, never at parties.  

The night before we went to see Hair, I washed my own hair, and when it was still wet I braided it in tiny braids all over my head. At that time my hair hung nearly to my waist and it was my idea to have a huge honey-brown “Afro” type hairdo. Sure enough, the next day when my hair was dry and I undid the braids, my cloud of hair stood out about a foot from my face. It was a statement – of what, I’m not sure, but I was pleased with my appearance, which I augmented with dangly beaded earrings, a peasant style long dress, and a leather vest with fringes. On my face I wore no make-up, but I did wear my John Lennon-type wire-rimmed glasses.  My boyfriend wore a headband around his hair, which was already curly and unruly, and hung to his shoulders. His vest had fringes too. 

Arriving at the theater, we stood in a huge crowd of excited hippies, most of them stoned out of their heads. I was totally straight and sober that night, because I thought I might be pregnant, and although I certainly didn’t look it, at heart I was responsible. It was a lonely feeling. But I loved the musical although its storyline was weak, and the famous nude scene was anti-climactic.  The next day my hair wasn’t quite so beautiful so I washed it and thus ended my Afro style – way too much trouble. I wasn’t pregnant, either.

As a young child in the 1950s, I thought Eisenhower was the most boring man alive. I couldn’t understand why my parents talked about him as if he was somebody important. I’d seen him on TV, and he looked about as boring as anyone could. He reminded me of the accountant who worked in my father’s office, a little old man (he was probably 50) who looked and smelled like he polished his bald head with Noxema. When I came to visit my father at work, this man would tell me stupid knock-knock jokes and then laugh at them himself.  

And I knew that Eisenhower, or “Ike” as my father called him (like they were best friends or something), would behave the same way, if I was ever unlucky enough to meet him.  But my father liked Ike. Dad  disapproved of Democrats because he said they spent too much of his money on things people should do for themselves. He liked Ike because he was prudent and frugal and never got excited about anything. My thoughts exactly.  

Ike’s wife Mamie was just like him. Really if you’re lucky enough to be the First Lady, should you be allowed to be so dowdy? Mamie wore stupid hats like my grandmother, and when she smiled she looked like she wished she didn’t have to. I was sure that Ike married her precisely because he didn’t want to be excited.  

For many years I equated the word “boring” with Eisenhower and it wasn’t until I was a grad student in history that I realized there was a little more to the man.

Before I got my new puppy, I resolved I would be firm. All the doggy experts say that crates are good things – they make the puppies feel secure. So I piled some soft blankets and towels in her crate for her to sleep in. No dogs in my bed!

I was going to put the crate in the kitchen, but she was so little – and so cute, with her soft floppy Beagle ears and her shining puppy eyes. It wouldn’t hurt if I put her crate in my bedroom. That way she could hear me breathing, and smell my smell.

Yeah. I put her in her crate, shut its grate, and climbed into bed. Said “Good night, Goody.” Turned off the light. Whining. I will just ignore it, I told myself. Right. Whining turned into whimpers. Alone and lost, the sounds infiltrated my ears as if someone poured warm honey into them, all sticky and gooey. How scared she must be. Where’s her mom, her brothers and sisters, that warm puppy smell?

Whimpering continued, and I got up and knelt down before her crate. I murmured “it’s okay, it’s okay” as I pushed my fingers through the grate, where a little tongue licked them desperately.

Who makes these firmness rules, anyway. I unlatched the crate and took her into bed with me, where she snuggled contentedly at the crook of my shoulder and neck, and where she still sleeps, every night, ever since.